


Houses As Big As Mountains

by general_magazinefan



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon)
Genre: AU, AUish, I hope you can forgive me, I'm really playing this by ear, Multi, but I'll tag it as, but it kind of isn't, so I'm expecting to not have tagged everything
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-09-27 03:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9953327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/general_magazinefan/pseuds/general_magazinefan
Summary: “Sometimes there's nothing you can do. [...] Sometimes they don't have enough to fight with.”― Tamora Pierce, Briar's BookIn the Unknown, two brothers become unstuck in time, a woodsman carries his daughter's soul, a bird longs to be human again, and a girl loses everything. What little do they hold on of themselves? What little will they find?(They say that sometimes you have to lose yourself to find yourself. I'm not sure if that's true, but then again, can I ever be?)





	1. Prologue: The Old Man and the Ghost

            An old man stooped over scattered twigs. He gathered them like pick-up sticks. He tucked some under his arm, others he slipped into the bundle on his back or stuffed into the hidden pockets of his thick coat.

          He heard a rustle in the bushes. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement, something causing even the leaves shudder. He was sure he heard it breathing. It sounded like rattling,  gasping, like shaking a bag of bone runes. It struck sharp, like wind knocking up against bare branches.

            The Woodsman went on unbothered by the noise. He figured it was nothing. Just some dying animal, just the earth breathing. The forest, the Unknown, whatever else it was called, was living, he guessed. He knew a bit about how it functioned. He knew it was more or less a patchwork quilt of different parts, gathering people and things and stories and weaving them together. Sometimes it trapped an occasional wayward traveler, other times it spat up lost souls. It was no question about why time seemed to get stuck here or why things never seemed quite right.

            Yet, he went on, no matter. It could be something dangerous, probably not. If every little thing he thought he saw bothered him, he would never get anything done.

            Little ruffled him, not anymore.

            He leaned down and grasped his lantern. He held it up, casting a halo of light that stretched out only a bit further than his feet. He swore the dark followed him these days. Like a devil just over his shoulder. Ever shadow was inky-thick, somehow not just absence of light, but another beast entirely. He guessed that’s just how it should be. He hardly remembered a time when it wasn’t.

            He shifted his shoulders, his joints aching, and trudged along, back to the place where he last felled a tree. He pulled out his axe and took a few swings at the thick trunk, humming to himself. It was a song he once heard, hung somewhere on the edge of his mind, in daydreams or maybe in life. He turned and buried the axe head into the stump behind his back. He swept up what chips of wood and branches he managed to break loose and turned to go back home.

_“What in the world is going on?”_

            The Woodsman froze. He swore he heard it, like a voice. The voice of a boy, distressed and high strung.

_“Well, you’re slapping yourself and I’m answering your question–"_

            And another. A smaller boy. Much younger.

            The man turned back around to find these voices, wherever they were. He knew the forest wouldn’t take kindly to strangers.

_“No, Greg. A bird’s brain isn’t big enough for cognizant speech.”_

_“Hey, what was that?”_

            And a girl? Or did he hear something about a bird?

_“I mean. I’m just saying, you’re weird, like not normal. I-I mean. Oh gosh, stop talking to it, Wirt.”_

            He spotted them behind an old log, talking to a bluebird perched in an oak tree.

_“It?”_

“What are you doing here?” He yelled, casting light on the two boys. He was sure they were the voices he had heard. One had a blue cape slung around his shoulders and a pointed red cap on his head. The other was short and pudgy. He wore a tea kettle as a hat and held a frog almost as big as he was in his arms.

            He yelled again, “Explain yourselves!”

“And I’ll see you guys later!” The bluebird flapped her wings and flew off.

“Cal-calm down, mister! W-whatever you do here is your business! W-we just want to get home with all of our legs and arms attached!” The gnomish one interjected.  
“These woods are no place for children. Don’t you know the Beast is afoot here?” The Woodsman leaned in closer and widened his eyes. He wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of what he said. He had come face to face with the Beast; he wouldn’t wish that fate upon even his worst enemy.  
“The beast? W-w-we don’t know anything about that! We’re just to lost kids trying to get home!”

“Well, welcome to the Unknown boys! You’re more lost than you realize!”

            So, the Unknown had spat up two more lost souls then?

            So be it. It begins again.


	2. Desert in the Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”_  
>  ― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Consciousness grabs Lydia by the throat and throttles her.

         A cry split her throat.

“Oh God!” She howled, arching her back.

         Every inch of her, every bone, every muscle, every fingerbreadth of skin screamed in visceral pain. Her lungs heaved with the effort to breathe, choking on mouthfuls of swirling ash, dust and smoke. She felt like she was pressed up against a hot plate. Her vertebrae were charred coals. Her blood was boiling. She was sure her hair had caught fire like wicks of a candle. She twisted to the side to escape but collapsed into convulsions.

         She was burning and she knew it. She was in a pyre or a house or a bonfire and she was burning.

         She felt like was going to die.

         Through the muffled roar of her blinding pain, something grabbed Lydia by the ankles and dragged her forward.

         In a moment it was all gone. The burning disappeared like a puddle in the hot sun. She wasn’t on fire anymore, at least not that she could tell. There was only a residual dull ache in her legs and the tail end of an adrenaline spike that could fell a horse.

         She took a shuddering breath and blinked.

         Her mind snapped to attention.

         She realized she was lying in the dirt. She could think again. The brilliant blue sky that hung above her registered in her mind. The knife-sharp wind did too.

_Where am I?_

         Lydia sat up slowly and looked around in confusion. She was on an open plain in some lonely desert. It was dry and sun-scorched. The landscape was barren, save for a few scattered clumps of dead grass and short mounds of dirt and sand. The land around her was as flat as the back of a frying pan and rolled out for as far and as wide as she could see. It made her think of Ezekiel and his visions of dry bones. She figured it was an apt enough comparison.

         She placed a hand on her chest, trying to calm the hummingbird pulse under her fingertips. She took notice of the necklace hanging from her neck and grasped at it, lifting it in her palm so she could get a look at it. It was round and silver and about the size of a quarter. There was a praying woman prostrate before a cross etched onto the face. She was veiled and shrouded with a halo. The words _St. Mary Magdalene_ were inscribed around the edge.

         She flipped it over. The name _Cherkovdka Sárika_  was engraved on the back in a loopy font. In that moment, Lydia couldn’t place it. The name wasn’t hers, that much she could tell. It bore a certain weight to it. Like it belonged to someone close. The knowledge left an empty space where Lydia figured it should be. She decided to put it to the side for the moment. She had more pressing questions to deal with.

         The first thing she should fix, Lydia guessed, was the uncomfortable amount of sand that had accumulated in her clothes. She patted down her front, smoothing out the gray long-sleeved blouse she wore. She shook dust from her red, flower print skirt and poured dirt out of her boots.

         Lydia decided that the next thing she should determine was how in the world she ended up in the middle of the desert all by herself. She was sure it wasn’t drugs, she felt no withdrawal symptoms and she had no marks of injection on her forearms. She didn’t fall asleep here last night either, that just wouldn’t make any sense. From her place on the ground, she saw no tire tracks, no footprints, no marks of any kind. It was as if she had just been dropped out of the sky or materialized out of thin air.

         It really just didn’t make any sense.

         Lydia figured that she probably needed to come up with a plan of how to deal with her predicament. She couldn’t stay there. She would die of starvation a hundred times over before some traveler chanced upon her. She had to go somewhere, but where, she hadn’t decided.

         She heaved herself to her feet. She spun on her toes, scanning the horizon. The edges of the shrub desert ended in the horizion. There was nothing, not a soul, not a hill, not even a wrinkle. In the end, she just picked the direction the wind was blowing and started walking. Even though she didn’t know where she was going, she figured that wandering through an uninhabited wasteland was better than sitting in the dirt, baking in the sun and starving to death.

————o————

          Lydia had been walking for a while now. She was sure it had been a half a day, at least. At this point, her screaming joints had dulled into a lingering burn. The sun had climbed higher into the sky, slowing to a crawl as it peaked directly overhead. It reached its brightest around noon, shining light like a naked bulb in a cellar. It cast everything unnaturally stark like a picture that had been washed out over years of light exposure. Sun reflected off the ashen grass, the sky was a piercing blue, there was no shade. Lydia had to squint to keep from going blind.

         Every once in a while, the wind would pick up in bursts and howl for hours on end. Other times it would kick up dust devils and sand storms that Lydia was sure stretched for miles. She would cup her hand over her eyes and pull at the collar of her shirt to duck into. She had to hunch over to keep from swallowing a mouthful of dirt every time she breathed. All moister had been sucked out of her, her lips had gone cracked, her hands were red, and her teeth felt gritty. She thought that if she could see her face, her brown skin would manage to be burned and caked with soil all at the same time.

         When the dust storms reached their worst, Lydia felt like she was caught in limbo. As the wind whipped around her, she wondered if all she had seen before, the land and the distance and life itself, wasn’t real. She figured she might die out here. She wondered if this would be her fate, to wander the desert until she wasted away like the sun-bleached cattle bones she had seen earlier.

         She prayed it wasn’t.

 ————o————

         The time she had to walk left her with time to sort through her thoughts. She tried to piece together what she last remembered. There was something. It wasn’t much, though. She could remember some sort of gathering, but she couldn’t seem to tease out the nature of it. Was it a funeral? A birthday party? A religious service?

         She really didn’t know.

         Another thing she noticed was her bizarre lack of factual knowledge about her own life. She remembered her name. She remembered how to speak and that she was fluent in both English and Hungarian. She knew how to do math and that the Earth rotated around the sun. She knew about stuff in general, but nothing about her family, her likes or dislikes, or where she lived. Nothing that actually pertained to her life.

         It was the strangest thing.

————o———— 

         At some point, the dismal desert landscape gave way to dry grassland. It reminded her of a documentary about pioneers. Rolling hills of fertile dirt and short grass. There were animals here too. Crickets sang in the brush. Lydia nearly twisted her ankle falling into a rabbit hole. Once she caught sight of buffalo roaming the plains in the distance.

         Sometimes when she looked up she saw wakes of buzzards circling overhead. She shivered at the thought of them descending.

         She pictured what it would be like to die. She knew dehydration would get her first. Death by deficiency, she guessed. She’d give one last shuddering breath. And then they’d pick apart her body, rib from rib; bone marrow stripped clean, muscle from cartilage and intestine. Only shards of splintered ossein would remain, her only testament to living.

         Shifting sands would bury her in the earth. Then in some far off century, a poor farmer would exhume her while tilling land for crops. They’d sell her to archaeologists for pocket change. They’d present her in a museum.

_And here, students, are the bones of one sixteen-year-old girl found in the great plains to the west. She seemed to have died alone. There were no tracks found nearby. She had no supplies, no identification besides the clothes on her back and the saint medal she wore around her neck. We don’t really know how she got there._

_With forensic and cross-cultural techniques, we can date her to the twentieth to the twenty-first century. Which makes this the mystery even stranger. You see, communication devices were quite advanced at the time. Radios were widespread by the 1920’s and 30’s and the first cell phone emerged in 1973. Police task forces and search parties at the time functioned much better than they had even fifty years before. Logically speaking, they should’ve found her before we did._

_It’s a mystery, even to this day._

 ————o————

         As the sun reached a quarter way, something thick and green appeared on the edge of her vision. It started as a thin black line. As Lydia walked it grew, stretching upwards and growing outwards. It took on the shape of a big stone. She noticed that the environment gave way again. The grass under her feet grew lusher; she passed sprouts of tall native grasses and small shrubs. The wind lost its snap and the air cooled off.

         It took her a while to identify what she was walking towards. Eventually, she realized it was a forest. That meant water somewhere there had to be water. Her headache and sand filled throat told her she needed to get there fast. She picked up her pace.

 ————o————

         Lydia finally found herself beneath the forest boughs. She wasted no time searching for something to drink. She dug her fingers into a patch of gravel beneath an oak tree and searched near the roots of a stretch of blackberry bushes. Within a few minutes, she found a bubbling stream winding itself around saplings and maturing hardwoods several hundred yards in from the forest’s edge.

         “Oh thank goodness.” Lydia sighed. She crouched on the bank and cupped as much water as she could into her parched mouth then stuck her hands in the creek to ease her blistering skin. She scrubbed under her nails and on her palms, washing the plains off her hands. She patted water onto her face, feeling flushed skin cooling, then collapsed back onto the trunk of a nearby maple.

         She shut her eyes and rubbed her temple, attempting to ease her pounding skull. And when that didn’t help she resigned to holding her head in her hands.

         As she sat on the bank in the grass she tried again to remember how she got here. She rooted through her memories, again finding nothing. Overcome by exhaustion, dehydration, and gnawing hunger, Lydia determined it was high time for a nap.

  ————o————

_Lydia was sitting on a plush felt couch. A woman with wiry gray hair and glasses with bottle glass thick lenses sat across from her. A silver saint medal dangled from her neck, the same one Lydia wore. She worked with bony fingers, doing stitching on a wood hoop with a pale canvas cloth stretched across the middle. She threaded a needle between her fingers, tacking pearls down a winding pattern. Lydia peered just over the hoop’s edge at the design. A smattering of flowers spread across the fabric. Pink daisies and willowy green vines curled around the circumference of the circlet. A swarm of golden bees bumbled careened across the scene, some peaking out of blossoms, others finding perch on leaves._

_Lydia sat in silence watching the woman work, waiting for her to make the first move or say the first word, or something, at least. She did nothing._

_Lydia’s attention wandered. She let her gaze explore the room. Lazy afternoon sun tumbled in through half-shuttered windows. A grandfather clock was shoved up against an aging bookcase stacked with fraying spines. She saw titles: “Jane Eyre”, “The Death of King Buda”, "Ildikó”, “Attila József: Selected Poems and Texts”._

_A framed black and white photograph of a young man hung above the mantle. He wore a pressed suit and had slicked back hair. She felt almost as if she knew him, she swore she had seen him somewhere befo—_

_“Unoka, look here.” The woman said._

_Lydia snapped her gaze back to her face, “Yes?”_

_The woman passed a needle threader and mustard colored thread to Lydia, who took it apprehensively._

_“What do you want me to do with this?” Lydia asked._

_“You dropped your embroidery on the floor.”_

_“Oh.”_

_Lydia picked up what the woman told her was her needlework and held it out in front of her. She snorted. Obviously, she wasn’t any good. Multi-colored strands overlapped and knotted together. Every stitch was uneven. Her flowers were disproportional, some gigantic, more like tiger orchids then daisies; others were as small as Wolffia flowers._

_Lydia looked up at the woman’s lined face again. Suddenly, it clicked. This was her grandmother, the one who sang Hungarian folk songs in the afternoon, the one who ran faster than light to escape her crushing poverty, the one she shared a last name with. Sárika Cherkovska, called the other way around at home. Nagyi. Lydia didn’t know how she didn’t recognize her before._

_Now she could place the memory. It was a particular summer years ago on one of the nicest days she could remember. She remembered her grandmother made her stay in rather than letting her go outside to play with the other kids on the block. She tried to relive the memory as she recalled it, in pieces of conversation, and forgotten intentions._

_“Why do you want me to do this?” Lydia asked._

_“Do what?” Sárika didn’t even glance up._

_“The needlework.” Lydia said, “Why should I care about needlework? I want to go outside.”_

_“It’s important to know these things.”_

_“Because I’m a girl?”_

_“No. Because you’re a person.”_

_“What?” Lydia cocked her head to the side; she couldn’t make head-or-tails of it. Maybe her grandmother had gotten lost in translation in the valley between her native and second tongue. It was definitely a long way._

_Sárika stopped her stitching to look up at Lydia._

_“Well. Think about it. What do you,” –she punctuated her question by pointing her needle at Lydia- “Learn from this?”_

_“That my hands can ache?”_

_Sárika visibly deflated a few inches, “No, no. That’s not it. Think again.”_

_Lydia paused and brought a hand to her chin. She thought again, for real this time. Still, she came up with nothing. It seemed rather pointless to her._

_“I really don’t know.”_

_“You know, I’ve always thought it a travesty that they don’t teach needlepoint to everyone, boys, and girls. Because what you do learn, often what playing out in a creek won’t teach you, what kicking a ball around won’t, is discipline. You learn to focus. You gain a steady hand.” Sárika pushed her glasses further up her nose._

_“Now whether you use that steady hand to be a doctor or to paint, or whatever, doesn’t depend on if you’re a girl or boy, you just gotta learn the basics somewhere, and why not here?”_

_“But it seems so silly. I can’t do this and do athletic stuff. It’ll look silly. It’s unheard of.” Lydia said._

_“Why? There’s no law stopping you from riding bikes, shooting guns, and doing needlework. No one’s saying that. At least no one I’d actually consider listening to.” Sárika smiled._

_“You gotta know that you can have both kinds of expression, you can do both if you want. It’s something I was never taught, something it took me a long time to know, and I want you to know that now.”_

_————o————_

“How do you fare, woman?” A voice shouted.

         Lydia screamed, torn from her thoughts. She jerked up and lashed out at the first pair of legs she saw, sending a man tumbling into the creek. Lydia scrambled to the bank's edge and gasped when she saw him crumpled on the rocks. He wore a knee-length tunic over a white tunic. He wore brown breeches and bucket-top boots. He looked like he had just left a renaissance fair.

“Who are you?” Lydia asked.

         He rolled over and groaned.

“Wait.” —Lydia winced— “Are you OK?”

   The man sat up and pushed his sopping brown hair out of his eyes.

“Do not fret over me, fair traveler, for I am more than fit as a fiddle.” He said.

“I’m so sorry for kicking you. You scared the living daylights out of me.” Lydia said.

“It is quite tolerable. I am panged with sorrow to have, as thou say ‘scare the living daylights out of you’.”

“Wait a minute.” She frowned; surely she had not heard him right. “Did you just say _thou_?”

“Why, yes! Though, I must say I am amiss of why thou sounst so astonished, for thou hast thy own peculiar sayings.” —The man got to his feet— “In truth, it is not the first time I have heard such strange things, in fact, my own good wife speaks such things, though none as odd as I hast heard on this day!”

“What in the world are you talking about? What year do you think it is?”

“I say it is the year of our good Lord, 1601, though my wife insists upon 1827.”

“Sixteen- _what now_?” Lydia gaped at the man.

         What sort of Elizabethan era hellscape had she fallen into?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, here I am again! So at this point, this story is going to be based off of the real story and is even going to include parts of it, but with my own twist. So like AUish. I wanted to add my own OC with her own stories and ideas to bring to the greater plot. I hope this is making some sense? Idk.
> 
> Also, I stretched a bit with that 17th century speech patterns and Hungarian phrases. For the former I used a grammar resource and cross checked with dialogue from Hamlet and for the latter I just used a dictonary. I hope I got it right. Thoughts?
> 
> Thank you for your kindness so far!  
> Feel free to hit me up if you got any feed back or something on your mind.


	3. The Old Grist Mill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“The burly woodsman who attacks the diminutive pine of the east must experience remorse, as would a strong man who made war upon a boy, but [the Redwood] is something to compel his respect; he must feel that in grappling with these monsters he is doing the work of a Hercules.”_  
>  ― Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: A California History

(Wirt looked up at the tree. It’s thick and large and twisted. Its gnarled front had a haunting face and gaping mouth, like a carved scream. Black sap dripped from its eyes and spilled out between twisting and cracked teeth. In the dark, it looked sticky and running like blood.)

“I found this homestead abandoned, and re-purposed its mill for my needs.” The Woodsman said.

         He crouched next to a green stone fireplace. He had taken the boys to a tiny, two-story wood house sandwiched next to a mill. It sat on a riverbank and ran on a waterwheel. It was as cold and empty as you’d expect a lonely old man to own. The Woodsman had never bothered to decorate it. Nothing could make the home anymore hospitable given the situation. What would be the point of new wallpaper anyway?

         Wind skated under the floorboards and rattled the windows. The Woodsman tried with shaky hands to a strike a flint. He wanted to light a stack of logs lying in the ashes in front of him. The fall winds always brought a cold snap to the forest, and this year was certainly no exception.

         He turned back towards the two boys, “You and your brother should be safe here, while I work.”

         Greg squatted next to the door, oblivious to both the Woodsman and his brother. He grinned and placed pieces of taffy on the floor, lining them up like a platoon of marching ants.

         He hummed just under his breath, “Candy trail, candy trail, cand- _dy_ trail…”

         Wirt looked between his brother and the old man. He frowned, “What, what is your…” —He raised an eyebrow and grimaced— “work exactly?”  
“Everyone has a torch to burn, and this here,” —The Woodsman reached down to pat an old-style railroad lantern— “is mine. I _grind_ the horrid Edelwood trees into oil, to keep this lantern lit.”

         He snapped a twig in two and threw it aside. It clattered to the floor and rolled under a chest.

         He dropped his voice so low it could scrape the floor, “This is my lot in life; this is my burden.” He stared glassy-eyed into the roiling fire. He saw shapes in the flames, a dancing girl, a swinging gate, something dragging, crawling in the bushes.

         Wirt narrowed his eyes and leaned over towards Greg, “This guy sounds loony.” He whispered, “Maybe we should make a break for it, i-if we can.” He stood back up.

“But he must know the woods really well, so we may need to knock him out first.”  Wirt balled his hand into a fist, curling right hand over left, “Except, that might turn out really badly, huh? Yea, bad, bad plan. Forget it. Bad plan.”

“Ok,” Greg said.

“What are you boys whispering about?”

“We were talking about runnin’ away outta here,” Greg said, pointing towards the door, another hand on his hip.

         Wirt blanched and tried to shush Greg, who grit his teeth and snapped back. It was like capping wildfire in a jar.  
         The Woodsman stood and turned again. This time he looked past the two boys and out the far window, down the dark road lined with trees that stood like ghosts.

“ _Leave_ , if you wish.” He said, “But remember: the Beast _haunts_ these woods. _Ever singiiing_ his _mournful melodyy_.” The Woodsman hefted his lantern up. The light cast across his face and made him appear like a sunken skeleton, a corpse staring out of its grave.

“ _In search of lost souls, such as yourselves!”_

“To help us?” Greg asked. He held Kitty tighter to his chest.

“ _No._ Not to help you.” The Woodsman snorted. He made his way towards the far door, “I have work to do in the mill. When I’m finished, I will do what I can to guide you. If you’re still _here_ when I return.” He huffed and clicked the lock shut behind him.

“Huh. I guess we could just leave,” Wirt said, “but I don’t know.”

         Greg walked over to pick up a log from a stack tucked in the corner of the room.

“Greg!”

“What?” Greg swung it. It was heavier than he expected; the inertia caused him to stumble forward. He tossed it aside.

“Do you think there really is a Beast out there?” Wirt asked.

         Greg crossed in front of him and pulled a decorative bird statue from a shelf.

“Or is that guy just messing with us?”  
“Uh-huh,” Greg answered, flinging the sculpture to the floor.

“I mean, he could’ve done away with us by now, if that was his plan. And he lit that fire, that’s pretty nice.” Wirt plopped himself down on the sofa against the back wall.

“Yeah!”

“I guess it’s possible there’s a Beast since there _was_ a talking bird but—”

“Yeah!”

         Wirt sighed, “I don’t know.” —he fell back on the couch— “Sometimes I feel like I’m just like… a boat, upon a winding river… _twisting_ , towards an endless black sea…” His eyes traced the knots and wood swirls in the ceiling.

         Greg grunted and swung a banjo, nearly missing the wall.

“Further and further, drifting away from where I want to be — _who!—_ I want to be…” Wirt rolled on his side and curled into a ball.

“Oh, I didn’t know that. Did you know that if you soak a raisin in grape juice, it turns into a grape?” Greg reached into his satchel and pulled out a fist-sized stone. It was lumpy and had a painted face, wall-eyed, tongue sticking out from yellow lips.

“It’s a rock fact!”  
         Wirt rolled his eyes, “Augh, you’re not helping at all. Why don’t you go play with your frog or something?”

“Aw beans!” —Greg clapped his hands on his cheeks, eyes wide— “Where is that frog o’ mine? Hold on there second-brother o’ mine!”

         Greg walked over to the door, “I’ll be back soon for your plan.” He stopped at the threshold and pulled two fists full of candy out of his pants. He scattered them on the floor, rolled gumballs and suckers, boxes of gumdrops and Tootsie rolls all together.

         He gave Wirt one last glance, before nodding in affirmation and going out into the night.

————o————

         The watermill cut through the silence, a monotonous drone of rushing water and creaking hundred-year-old wood.

“Kitty!” Greg called, small voice nearly swallowed by the vastness.

“Kitty! Now, where did that frog named ‘Kitty’ go? Whup—” Greg slipped backward on a lone piece of taffy.

“I tripped on my own candy trail!” He laughed. He smiled and rolled over onto his stomach.

         A low growl rose in the dark distance.

“What?” Greg muttered. He got to his feet and followed the sound up to the edge of the trees. Behind him, a ribbit comes from the mill.

“That frog’s givin’ me the run-around.” Greg grinned and headed back towards the front of the mill. He looked up the wall at the jutting edge of a windowsill. He figured Kitty must’ve wandered in there, inside the cutting room. He cast more candy on the ground and went up to an empty drum left up against the face of the building. He shimmied up to the top of the barrel and peered inside the window.

“Kitty?” Greg asked. He caught sight of the Woodsman at work. He stood in front of a grinding wheel, feeding branches by candlelight into its mouth. A stream of black sludge poured out a tap in the front into an empty milk bottle.

         Greg scrunched his nose, “Gross.”

         He heard another ribbit.

“Kitty?” He snapped his gaze behind him.

         This time he heard more growling, wheezing like old lungs.

“Hmm…” Greg started, “is that—woah!” The top of the barrel gave way under him. He felt into the empty inside and landed on top of his frog.

“Oh, there you are!”

         The growling closed in, growing louder.

“Wirt? Kitty?”

         A beast swung its head over the barrel, staring down at Greg with glassy yellow eyes, pinpoint red, rimmed with piercing blue.

         Greg clutched Kitty to his side, “You have beautiful eyes!” He managed to choke out.

         The monster screeched, opening its maw, exposing row after row of serrated teeth. Its tongue lolled; its eyes burned.

————o————

         Flames crackled in the fireplace lowered now to a dull roar. Wirt sat on the plush couch playing with a cup-and-ball. He tried rather clumsily to solve the thing. Every time he came close, success slipped right through his fingers like sand in a sieve. It just skidded off the edge or bounced off the rim, missing the target entirely. It made him frown in frustration.

         A crash sounded from outside. It caught his attention; he couldn’t tell if it was glass breaking, he hoped it wasn’t bone.  
“Greg?”

         Something clattered to the ground in the next room. The Woodsman ran quick and threw open the door.

“What’s happening? Where’s your brother?”

         Wirt shrugged, “I dunno.”

         “Oh holy moly,” Greg stumbled in the front door, tangled in something dark and planks of shattered wood.

“Hot dog!” The door swung open, throwing Greg forward onto a flight of stairs. They could see the beast clearly now in the opaque light. It was a big, black dog, with a body the size of a truck, a head the size of a boulder, bulging eyes that glowed like spotlights.

“It’s the Beast!” Wirt gasped, slapping his hands over his mouth.

“Stay back, boys!” The Woodsman wielded his axe, hefting it high over his head.

         Greg rolled down a few steps.

“This creature, which is known as—”

         Greg swung a plank of splintered wood at the Woodsman, knocking the top hat of his head. It disoriented the Woodsman, causing him to stumble and fall, collapsing like a matchstick tower. He smacked the back of his head on a log, knocking him out in an instant.

“ _Greg, why did you do that?_ ” Wirt yelled.

“That was the plan, remember? Knock him out!”  
“No! bad plan!”

         The dog stalked towards Wirt, who groped behind him for the fireplace guard to use as a shield.

“I _told_ you to forget that plan!” Wirt screamed and hunched forward.

         Greg ran up behind the dog and smacked it with the handle of the Woodsman’s axe, “Spank, spank— spank!” The dog whipped around and snarled at him.

         Wirt leaped to his feet and sprinted past Greg.

“Run, run, run, run, _run!_ ”

“ _Candy_ camouflage!” Greg stuck his hand in pants and tossed candy into the air. Then followed Wirt, axe and frog in hand.

         The dog chased them. It lapped at their heels, snarling and snapping. Wirt and Greg burst into the next room. The dog followed suit but its bulky paws slid on the cobblestone floor. It crashed up against the far wall. A wheel-sized gear broke from the ceiling and collapsed on top of it.

“Greg!”

         Wirt pulled Greg out of the way of falling timbers, back up onto a raised platform where the wall propped up a grinder and a crate of spare tools.

“This is amazing, huh?” Greg asked.

         The dog wiggled free and heaved itself to its feet. It paced forward, leaving tracks of dark liquid; its eyes two lights in the dark. Wirt spotted a sack of potatoes in a heap against the wall juncture. He gathered them up into his arms and began tossing them at the dog’s long face.

“Am _I_ supposed to throw something?” Greg asked. He looked left and right at his hands.

         Wirt realized his efforts were useless and chucked the whole bag at the beast. The monster howled so loud, the force knocked Greg on his back.

“Oh yeah!” Greg reached down and unloaded the pockets full of candy he had stashed on the ground in front of him.

         The dog stopped short and lapped up them up wholesale, still wrapped and tied, covered with dust and all.

“He’s eating your candy?” Wirt tilted his head to the side.

“I wonder if he ate my whole candy trail that led to this mill!”  
“Augh!” —Wirt smacked Greg upside his head— “Greg! You led the Beast _right to us_ with your _candy!_ ”

         The beast rattled the platform the brothers stood on. It threw its body weight up against the side and dug its claws onto the top. It managed to flip the slab over, sending the boys to the ground and separating them from its claws, creating a makeshift wall.

         Wirt reached over his brother, “Hey, gimme the axe. You’re too little to have it anyway.”

         The dog barked and snapped its jaw, nose poked just in the crack between the capsized platform and the mill’s load-bearing wall.

“Ah! W-w-we gotta, we gotta get out of here!” Wirt said.

         Greg grabbed Wirt’s elbow and pointed toward a ladder that climbed up towards a trapdoor in the ceiling. They both ran over and scurried up the rungs. They shuffled along a stake-thin ledge and clambered out a skylight door. They found themselves out on the roof in the cool night air.

         The dog clawed its way up and broke through the roof, not missing a beat.

“Greg!” Wirt yelled, backing towards the edge behind him, “Give him the rest of your candy!”  
         Greg rifled through his pants but found nothing. After all this time, his supply had finally been exhausted. He caught sight of a red buttermint stuck to Wirt’s cape. He grabbed it and tossed it behind him. It flew off the roof, landing somewhere in the river that wound behind the homestead.

“Whoops!” Greg winced.

         The dog leaped off the roof in hot pursuit. It landed on the waterwheel with a sickening crack and got pushed up against a rock. Its lower body was completely crushed. It choked and whimpered, bones and ribs causing the whole mill to shake, the wheel and belt and grate grinding to a halt. The roof split from under Greg and Wirt’s feet. The loss of ground and building sent the two brothers into the river.

         The dog spat up sap and a black turtle before getting dragged underwater.

         Wirt surfaced and clambered out of the river. He clutched the axe handle tighter and stared at the small creature where it landed in the grass. It wobbled and sprouted legs, a piece of blue taffy stuck to its back.

“Hey Wirt, look!” Greg shouted.  
“Greg?” Wirt glanced around hesitantly.

“Wirt!” Greg emerged over the bank’s edge on the back of a shaggy and soaking pointer dog, Kitty right behind him.

“He spat out that turtle, and now he’s my new best friend!” Greg hugged the back of the dog’s neck.

         The dog bucked, knocking Greg and Kitty onto the ground.

“Oh! Hey, where are you goin’?” Greg asked.

         The dog ignored him and wandered further down the river’s edge, opposite of the water flow.

“Ain’t that just the way?” Greg sighed to his frog, shaking his head in dismay.

“The mill is destroyed!” The Woodsman cried in anguish. He stood before the mill, now in ruins. A gear jutted out like a clawed hand, planks dangled loosely like cut strings. Wirt wasn’t sure how the building was still standing. The walls had been ruptured; it should’ve collapsed.

“The oil! All gone!” The Woodsman fell to his knees, picking a shattered glass bottle up into his hands. He furrowed his eyebrows and trembled.

“But, b-but look!” Wirt pointed toward the brown and white dog, now asleep in the grass nearby, “We, w-we got the Beast problem solved.”

“ _The dog?_ ” The Woodsman shouted, “That is _not_ the Beast!” He snatched his axe out of Wirt’s hands.

“The _Beast_ cannot be _mollified_ like some _farmer’s pet!_ ”

         He gasped, “He _stalks, like the night!_ ” —He swung his axe at a rock, slicing through it like cutting a cake— “He sings like the Four Winds. He is the _Death of Hope!_ He steals their children and, he’ll ruin…” He squatted, trailing off into mumbles and sniffles.

“You’re always messing up, Greg!” Wirt snapped, his tone harsh and low, aimed like an arrow at his younger brother. He smacked his fist against Greg’s teapot.

“Boy!” The Woodsman barked,” You have it backwards! _You_ are the elder child! _You_ are responsible for _you_ and _your brother’s_ actions!” The Woodsman pointed at the mill.

“Ah, ah, I’m sorry. Maybe I can… fix it?” —Wirt glanced at the broken building again— “I… I can’t fix it.”

“You must go.” The Woodsman sighed. He cast his lantern out over the river, off towards a road, “Take your brother north. Look for a town.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Wirt grabbed his brother by the arm and took him in the direction the Woodsman had pointed them, “Come on, Greg.”

         Wirt skipped over the stones that stuck up out of the water; Greg opted to wade in ankle deep.

“One last thing!” The Woodsman shouted, lantern light paling his skin, yellowing eyes flashing, “ _Beware_ , the Unknown! _Fear the Beast!_ And leave these woods! If you can. It is _your_ burden to bear!”

“Right, yeah, ah, got it,” Wirt said, nodding as best he could.

“And you, little one.” The Woodsman softened, directing his final instructions at Greg, “You look after that frog. Give it a proper name.”

         The frog croaked in Greg’s arms, “Okay.” Greg said.

         The Woodsman watched them climb up the riverside and trail off into the woods. For a moment they flickered as they passed into the darkness at the edge of the woods. Then, they vanished, disappearing like snuffed candle flames.

         They left faint silhouettes that hung like wisps of smoke. Listless phantoms under a sheet of stars and surrounded on all sides, by shadow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I didn't post on Sunday like I expected to. Maybe it's not a good idea for me to have a schedule, especially considering the busiest time of the year from a school perspective is coming up, but still, I tried. Little did I know I would have something on literally every night last week.
> 
> Anyway, sorry this is kind of filler-ish. I still wanted to intertwine the new and old plots. I'm still ironing it out, you see. The next chapter is due to be a tad bit longer, so I wouldn't be suprised if I post it late or something. 
> 
> Also, thank goodness there is an OTGW transcript, or this would've taken me 10 times longer and I might've actually lost my mind.
> 
> I hope you still enjoyed it though! Feedback is always appreciated!

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys! This is my first work on this site. I've been turning this idea around in my mind since last fall when I first watched OTGW. I guess I just decided to jump in and do it, because, hey, what do I have to lose? I really like feedback by the way, if you can give it. I hope you like what I've written so far. Thanks!


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